It’s been a while, but now I have no excuse!

My last post was sent from an internal tool we have at Microsoft that provides RSS and newsgroup integration into Outlook. I’ve been using it for a while to download feeds but I thought I’d try and see if I could post an entry to my long dormant blog. I wasn’t expecting it to be so easy, so I didn’t put a whole lot of effort into the post, but its nice when things just work. So now I have no excuse for blogging more often J

Over the summer I was working on the VSTO team to deliver Outlook support in VSTO 2005. As part of that effort I wrote an add-in for Outlook that did something similar using the My.Blogs toolkit. It uses a side-by-side window to display feed status and allows you to create blog posts and queue them up for publishing. It also implemented a nifty feature where you could book mark an email as interesting fodder for future posts, and then automatically turn book marked emails into a post ready for editing and publishing. The sample does not implement all of the functionality of a commercial tool, hence my use of our internal tool, but it could act as a starting point for a custom RSS aggregator.